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If Housemarque has proven anything in its 22 years crafting modern-day arcade classics, it's that it has exceptional taste in games. Super Stardust cribbed gleefully from Asteroids, while Super Stardust HD folded a little Robotron into the mix, and Resogun - perhaps Housemarque's most widely played game to date - did a more than passable impersonation of Defender. Hot on the heels of Nex Machina, Housemarque's collaboration with Defender and Robotron creator Eugene Jarvis, comes PlayStation 4 exclusive Matterfall, which sees the developer looking beyond the chaos and charisma of the 80s arcade for inspiration This is, in short, Housemarque's take on Gunstar Heroes; an explosive side-scrolling platformer where firepower is everything. It's much more than that, though - a thoughtful hybrid of Housemarque's own style with that of Gunstar Heroes' esteemed (and sadly AWOL) developer Treasure, Matterfall emerges as very much its own thing. And that thing can feel very special indeed.
Matterfall retains the twin-stick set-up of Housemarque's arcade fare and transposes it neatly into a side-scroller. You're free to shoot in any direction you desire, your jumps mapped to a shoulder button alongside a handy dash that describes an electric blue streak on-screen, stunning any enemies in its path. Combine that with a separate matter gun, mapped to another of the shoulder buttons and one that brings form to translucent platforms while also detonating matter bombs that are occasionally left in downed enemies' wake, and you have a simple yet effective vocabulary with which you can wreak havoc.
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